Monthly Archives: June 2009

It’s often true that court reporting exaggerates sentences to make them sound ludicrous, and I have railed against that before. But this case a fortnight ago – held in a jurisdiction where juries get to award damages – is beyond ridiculous:

In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset, who was originally accused of sharing more than 1,700 songs, at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was ultimately found guilty of illegally sharing.

I haven’t the words. What an affront to justice and common sense. $1.92 million for 24 songs? What was that based on – the amount the RIAA executives rip-off from artists and consumers each day?

Still, you’ve got to admire the work of the RIAA’s lawyers. You know, the sheer skill they must have employed – regardless of what it was used for. What unmitigated but spectacular bullshit they must have sold that jury. They may have been working for evil, but they clearly did it really, really well.

Moral test time. Would you dare to defend this barbarism in the flimsy guise of “brutally blowing the head off someone who smuggles heroin SAVES LIVES!11!”? Or “when they chose to carry a prohibited substance on their person, they should’ve expected some psychopath with a gun would fire it into their skull with such force that the entire top half disappears.”

If you said “yes”, you sicken me.

Meanwhile, if you have the stomach to click through to the images, how many bloodthirsty thugs with guns does China need just to slaughter a handful of prisoners?

AS MOST Victorians woke to a bright, sunny winter’s morning, 11 families received heart-stopping phone calls that would change their lives forever.

Three collisions had taken six lives overnight. The dead were aged 15, 16, 18, 19, and one of them was in their 20s.

This is beyond tragic. What a horrible waste of human life. What awful, indescribable loss.

That’s no reason that the deaths can’t be ghoulishly used to justify more revenue-raising tougher road laws, though. The deputy police commissioner is already getting started:

Speed may have been involved, he said.

As a community, we know and expect what’s coming next. The important thing is to continue to make the traffic laws ever more unreasonable. If teenagers have died, then clearly speed limits and penalties for speeding are still far too low. How about 40kph on freeways, 20kph on suburban roads, and $10,000 fines for anyone who exceeds them?

We will know we’ve got the balance right when road deaths are impossible.*

The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.

…a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.

Isn’t that wonderful? I’m sure Australians will be more than happy to lose access to eBay, Amazon, and any other overseas commerce sites that won’t be bothered reorganising themselves just to pander to the pitifully small Australian market.

Michael Jackson, one of the world’s most prominent producers of weird and freaky shit, died this morning of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was fifty years old.

Although he first rose to fame for his musical talent – first as a child, as one of the Jackson 5, and then writing and performing timeless hits like Billie Jean, Thriller, and Stop Pressuring Me About The Creepy Stuff I Keep Doing – it was his bizarre and inexplicable antics in later years that really struck a chord with the public and made him a star.

You don’t have an enormous painting of you crowning and knighting yourself in your house?

“You could always rely on Michael to come up with something unexpected and disturbing,” friend and producer Quincy Jones told the LA Times.

“Whether it was sleepovers with other people’s children, tearing his face apart with horrendous plastic surgery, clearly fake marriages, naming his two sons “Prince”, dangling one of them out of a window, commissioning unbelievably kitsch works of “art” – Michael Jackson was undoubtedly the King Of Batshit Insane. I will miss him terribly, as will everyone else who made a great deal of money off him.”

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The contents of this blog are entirely fictional (and often ridiculous), intended only to amuse, or to provoke lively, non-libellous discussion. Opinions expressed on the blog do not in any binding sense represent the views of any organisation of which the author is a member. Links to external sites should not be taken as endorsement of their content or views.